


Bitter Roots

by inkanddusk



Category: Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
Genre: -ish....., Angst, Canon Compliant, Loneliness, One Shot, POV Third Person, References to Macbeth, he’s not having the Best Time, perhaps an excessive amount of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:34:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28146177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkanddusk/pseuds/inkanddusk
Summary: “I shunned my fellow creatures as if I had been guilty of a crime.”~Victor begins the fall from grace.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 7





	Bitter Roots

**Author's Note:**

> saw a discussion on discord recently about how young victor really was in the whole Creating Life thing. so, I wrote something: because I personally feel it is an important fact to add a sense of empathy to his character that often gets ignored :O

He is seventeen when he becomes acutely aware of how alive he is.

His heart dampens, raw and heavy, the rotting remnants of fruit that has been softened by too many hands. It threatens to weep dark, damning tears, free from its confines within a chrysalis of ribs.

Perhaps he is softening all over. His conduct loosens. He begins to falter, attention wavering in lectures, thoughts scattering like paper butterflies and settling to feed on the pulp in his chest.

He is also sharpening. The valley of his cheekbones grows stark, his words clipped and terse.

“Is something the matter, Frankenstein?”

They are the words of his professors. Krempe speaks with an undercurrent of triumph, as if Victor has already failed. It hardens his hatred into something physical, a cold grit that scrapes his teeth as he smiles haughtily.

“Nothing at all.”

If Waldman asks the same question, he receives the same response. The tone, however, falters into one more diffident. When he speaks to Victor, it makes him feel seventeen, because there’s something oddly paternal about his manner, to a startling degree.

“Are you certain? You haven’t been yourself of late.”

Who is Waldman, to believe he really knows Victor at all? He stays silent, seething, strangely insulted.

“And you look tired out. Exhausted.”

Victor steels his softening resolve. “I’m alright.”

“You haven’t been attending classes as frequently as you are wont to.”

“Please leave me alone.”

The words prickle like pins, and puncture the swollen emotion in his chest.

Waldman sighs, and gives the look that reminds Victor so sorely of how he is the grown adult, more qualified. Wiser, perhaps. It is equal parts infuriating and comforting.

“If you were struggling, you know you can speak to me about it?”

“I’m not struggling.”

He is anything but struggling. Time is moving fluidly, slipping, sand between profane fingers. The clock spirals.

“Alright,” Waldman says in his grown-up manner, even and slow. He humours Victor, in this way.

Though, he still watches. Victor scowls in defiance, fists tightening atop his desk when he writes, brows fixed in a frown when he listens to lectures.

Sometimes, his hands slacken of their own accord, as he is taken by a fit of thought, dark and dreary. On occasion, he knows he is not glaring any more, because his head pounds and it pains him unduly to look so cold and detached.

He feels seventeen when his professor then offers him tea and cake, or insists he takes some rest after hours of study.

“I do not need such things,” he says, supercilious, squaring his shoulders. “I am not a child.”  


“You are not a man.”

And Victor protests bitterly. He declines and defers until the word ‘no’ grows reflexive.

But sometimes, as he watches the professor’s retreating back, he could split, and bleed everything in confessions and cries.

The forbidden fruit oozes with his pulse. He is hungry.

He stays hungry. There’s a ravenous need to devour the texts he pores over, as if they will be snatched from him. His mind is a pleading, pitiful thing. Insatiable. It feasts on hours and days, famished, and his hands tremble with restraint.

At once, he grows empty and fulfilled. Words take root, threaded with his veins, verdant. And he scatters his leaves— in every aloof look and cool remark and unplanned absence.

He scatters until he is bare. A knot of stripped branches, hung with the costume of somebody very capable and very wise.

The tender decay throbs in his breast as the juices of affection turn sour. The harvest ages.  


He becomes cool and crisp alongside winter. His drinks leach into fragile air, sighs pale vapour, eyes frosted glass. Sounds seem to ring, light and grating, a glacial, musical peal.

Often, there are death knells. He listens with a practiced secrecy, and descends upon fresh graves as a vulture would on prey. The bones are stripped clean— or indeed— serve their own purpose in his work.

It is not a clean duty. Countless garments grow stained and spattered, shredded about the sleeves.  


He pauses to scrub and scrub at his hands, scouring knuckles and shaving bone. They never appear unblemished.

_Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?_

It does him no good to lament with the words of fictive tongues. Such extremes of thought only lead him astray— to Henry, homeward bound. Somewhere he hasn’t the nerve to entertain. 

Victor remembers he is seventeen when his door sounds in knocks, shaking him from this pondering. When he ignores the call of his university friends— _acquaintances_ — to step outside for a hot meal or a winter’s walk. When he snaps for peace and quiet. 

They sound young. Boyish and buoyant. Bright and blithe. It scathes and scares him. They seem to cling to something he lost his faltering grip on a long time ago. 

So, he lets go of more. He pushes away company, neighbours, staff, all dismissed. Some sharp and sibilant side to him revels in his empty, yawning apartment. The other shivers, and runs anxious hands against the papered walls, tracing the pattern with a senseless absence. 

He plants himself in the attic room. His fingers are frail twigs, hair long and unkempt as overgrown foliage. 

The stagnant remainder of his once-sweet yield flutters, thready and trickling, and settles near his shoes, as waste. 

Seventeen heartbeats. He counts, and recalls every year he has walked the earth, and how his future is a haze of each cadaver, each meticulous stitch and measurement. 

It is not fair. Matter dark and metallic incarnadines all. He shall sleep no more. _He does murder sleep, the innocent sleep._ His scalpel, a phantom dagger. 

_Or art thou but_  
_A dagger of the mind, a false creation,_  
_Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?_

He will not be stealing away life. He reminds himself of this noble purpose, and how he surely outshines the stars, muted, hiding their fires. 

The dark is welcome, even so. 

He shivers, and burns, and his knife quakes between his fingers. 

The weeks peel away like blood-soaked gloves and reluctant eyelids. 

And when his seventeenth year expires, with an exhale of cold and the turn of the year, he realises that his overripe heart has been clenched too tightly. 

It glistens in an echo of produce. 

He hungers. 

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀


End file.
